First, about this friend: he’s financially successful and his career is on the upswing and peaking. He’s making a lot of money. He has a lot of friends due to his extraversion, friendliness, and interest in common topics, especially traveling. He is a good looking fellow, and he is primarily control/agency stabilized with esteem/status secondary, low coherence, low meaning/narrative, medium attachment/belonging. He is part of an upper social layer and is a figure in his community.

Alternatively, as regular readers know, I am primarily coherence stabilized, with secondary stabilizers of control/agency and meaning/narrative. I have very low esteem/status or attachment/belonging drives. I think the ambivalence is seeing someone my age, from a similar background, become rich and successful in this world - the gulf in career trajectories and life trajectories only widens, deepens, becomes more clear as one ages - really valued for what he is doing, with no psychological or psychosomatic “tax” being paid for following his own path, while my calling is toward a pessimistic esoteric spirituality which has resonance with only a tiny, tiny, tiny number of people worldwide. Yes, I’ve argued that an Abraxian worldview can spread only by resonance one soul at a time, not as an egregore for mass adoption; but there is still a part of me that does want recognition and success for my efforts, of course. I have to live in the real world as well; unless I made a career off of this work somehow, there is still bills to pay, food to eat, taxes, gas, insurance, etc; this means that, even though I pay a significant psychosomatic “tax” interacting with an extraverted, money-obsessed, status-obsessed shallow and forgetful world, I have to live in this world at least in part, in my friend’s world, even though he doesn’t have to live at all in mine. And so that rankles.

But there is another layer to this too: I cannot fully follow my path fulltime, even if I had the financial resources to do so; and the reason for this is it is too easy for it to become an echo chamber, my path requires me to place myself into uncomfortable situations that then cause me to reflect on the various issues, energies that arise from those situations.

So this is a situation of the crucifixion of the opposites: I can’t follow my path full-time even if I had the resources to do so and wanted to, because I must place myself in situations that are outside my comfort zone constantly in order to continually refine my worldview. But this increases my resentment as well, because it is torn between competing poles. Most of the time the resentment is backgrounded - it’s not suppressed, I acknowledge it, it’s there and probably permanent based on this structural condition - but from time to time it becomes foregrounded, especially when I am interacting with age peers who have become so successful in life. Or to put it another way, it hits upon my secondary stabilizer of control/agency, making it jealous and temporarily foregrounded.

So ultimately this isn’t about my buddy, who I consciously do want to be successful and happy and have a great life, but I do recognize the underlying jealousy at the lack of psychosomatic tax he has to pay, how easy it is for him to do his calling and get rewarded by society for it, while I am crucified between the opposites and almost totally unrecognized for my calling work, even as I have to live in my buddy’s world and he doesn’t have to live in mine. There’s nothing to be done about this functional contradiction, either; the mere articulation of these crucifying energies is the Hermetic function, it lowers psychosomatic pressure by articulating it and sharing it with others; and the feedback I receive from others, too, helps keep me from falling into an echo-chamber.

This is just one example of the work, but I’m constantly juggling and dealing with competing energies like this on a continuous basis.

https://substack.com/@hermesofthethreshold/note/c-330430719

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5900920&forum_id=2],#50117866)